vrijdag 5 oktober 2012

My wife was really amazed getting a letter from Serco in behalf of the NHS.
This was completely new! The National Health Service was always fully capable of sending their own letters.
The letter my wife got was sent at a totally wrong moment. It made us think what this was about. Why is Serco sending these letters and what is Serco?

We found out at the website of Serco what this company is doing exactly. That the name is short for Service Company is obvious. (http://www.serco.com/media/pressreleases/index.asp)
And on Wikipedia you can find a wiki about Serco: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serco
You can see that Serco is a division of RCA and RCA has been bought and split up before selling by General Electric. If General Electric still has an interest in Serco is not very clear.

Serco has a remarkable field of interest. They are exploiting nuclear power stations, prisons, electronic tagging devices, border guards, railroads (even involved in Abellio, a joint division with Nederlandse Spoorwegen), buslines, metro lines, traffic monitoring, drivers license bureaus, parking meters, speed camera systems, laboratories, education controls, leisure centers, waste collection services, nuclear weapons, naval bases, air traffic control, health care and so on and so on. Revenue in 2011 was 4,646.4 million pounds.
And they are slowly getting a grip on the health care in the UK (just like Richard Branson's Virgin company).
It's very disturbing to see that health care is seen as a way to make a profit.

And I think it's more than worrying to see how much power Serco has in the world. Imagine a world where Serco merges with for instance Facebook and you would have a controlling system over the people in a way George Orwell (1984!) could never even have dreamed of.
Of course that they are dealing with the health care in the UK and showing that they don't know what they are doing or should be doing is mere irritating. And is bad for the reputation of the NHS.
But what can we do?
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